Impression management

In the social sciences, impression management refers to the processes through which people attempt to influence the way other people perceive them. It is sometimes used more broadly to refer to the ways people attempt to influence other peoples’ perceptions in general, whether of themselves, other people, an object, or an idea, but it is in the first sense that the term was formulated, and that most sociological and psychological work on impression management continues to focus on.

Many of the most interesting aspects of impression management are the subconscious processes, but it also includes conscious behaviors such as simply suppressing overt emotional responses in inappropriate environments (not laughing in church or crying in business meetings) as well as consciously manipulating others’ perceptions. In the 2010s, much work has focused on the way impression management occurs online and on social media.

Background

The concept of impression management was introduced in sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, first published in Scotland in 1956 but not reaching a wide audience (even in the field) until its American publication in 1959. It has since been recognized as one of the influential books in the social sciences. In his initial explanation of impression management, Goffman (1922–82) used an extended analogy of social interactions between individuals as a theatrical performance in which each "actor" is making decisions about the aspects of their persona to highlight through their performance, based on their self-conception and the impression they want to make on others.

Beyond the idea that people try to influence the way others see them, Goffman’s initial formulation has two other important ideas. First, that the presentation of self is—again, consciously or unconsciously—a mutually cooperative effort, in that most social interactions include a mutually agreed upon "definition of the situation," in Goffman’s terminology. This leads to the actors assisting each other in maintaining their respective personae. One of the examples Goffman gives is of the way that people at a formal event may pretend not to notice when a fellow attendee trips or spills a drink, just as the attendee attempts to quickly recover and pretend it didn’t happen. In everyday life we may think of this as simply part of etiquette or manners, as "the way things are done," or, in Chinese social life, as "saving face." Goffman’s point is about the motivation underlying such systems of etiquette, which leads to his second idea: that the core motive driving impression management is to avoid embarrassment.

Goffman extended his work in 1967’s Interaction Ritual, which borrowed the Chinese idea of "face" and turned it into a Western sociological term meaning positive social value. According to Interaction Ritual, etiquette can be understood as a set of ceremonial rules of conduct that act as constraints in actors’ behavior during social interactions. Both of Goffman’s books continue to be referenced in the social sciences.

Overview

Impression management is no longer solely the purview of sociology, however. It is an area of study in psychology, business and management studies, and communication studies, including studies of social media and other computer-mediated communications. Social psychologist Edward Jones and others introduced Goffman’s work to the field of psychology in the 1960s, and it helped to inform the concept of social identity: the version or construct of an individual that other people perceive in social interactions. From a social psychological perspective, impression management is a system of processes aimed at influencing one’s own social identity.

Impression management begins in childhood—just how early is not something psychologists agree on, but by an early age children are able to demonstrate that they can foresee the effect that their behavior and words will have on other people’s attitudes toward them, and will even express concerns about this unprompted. (Impression management at very young ages depends on theory of mind, the ability to understand that other people have states of mind different from one’s own. One of the major debates in child psychology is whether or not this exists in children under the age of three or four.)

Concepts of impression management have been taught in several industries in order to facilitate professional communication. For instance, impression management theory has been taught in the health care field as a way to explain to health care providers the importance of balancing the needs of professionalism with the emotional needs of patients and their loved ones. Businesses have also used impression management theory as a way to discuss cross-cultural communication and the ways that interactions can have different meanings in different cultures, or that ceremonial rules of conduct governing such interactions vary from culture to culture.

Impression management theory has found new importance with the rise of the Internet and social media. Goffman’s work, and most impression management work until the 1990s, focused on face-to-face interactions. Much of that work is still applicable to online interactions. But just as mentions of body language or tone of voice would be inapplicable to most online interactions, online interactions also involve previously unexplored considerations. Sociolinguists have explored the ways that spelling words out and using punctuation online conveys different tones to different demographic groups—ways that have changed over the lifespan of the Internet. Further, the lack of a physical presence has not only led to greater possibilities of conscious deception—from slight exaggerations to "catfishing," the use of a made-up persona on online dating sites, for example—but to the phenomena of cyberbullying and trolling, with sociological studies confirming that online users feel free to be crueler in their social interactions online than they would be in face-to-face interactions.

Impression management, however, involves much more than intentional deception or manipulation. A subtler social media example would be a Facebook or Instagram user untagging themselves from a photo that they find unflattering. (Sociologists call this a subtractive strategy.) The user may give little thought to this choice, and it would be a stretch to call this deceptive; it amounts simply to selecting the photos that are easily identified as positive depictions of the user, and thus subtly changing the online presentation of their identity.

Bibliography

Bertino, Elisa, and Kenji Takahashi. Identity Management: Concepts, Technologies, and Systems. Norwood: Artech, 2011. Print.

Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Print.

Cunningham, Carolyn, ed. Social Networking and Impression Management: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. Print.

DuBrin, Andrew. Impression Management in the Workplace. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Goffman, Erving. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face to Face Behavior. Piscataway: Aldine, 2005. Print.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 2014. Print.

Laurent, Maryline, and Samia Bouzefrane. Digital Identity Management. London: Elsevier, 2015. Print.

Leary, Mark R., and Robin M. Kowalski. "Impression Management: A Literature Review and Two-Component Model." Psychological Bulletin 107.1 (1990): 34–47. Digital file.

Mose, Tamara R. The Playdate: Parents, Children, and the New Expectations of Play. New York: NYU P, 2016. Print.